PERCEPTION, ACTION AND INTER-ACTION: AN ECOLOGICAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF SOCIAL KNOWING James M.M. Good Department of Psychology University of Durham "If one pieces together the literature on event perception, one catches glimpses of a world in which objects loom, people walk, wheels roll, heads age and forms collide. One does not, by and large, catch glimpses of a world in which people think, imagine and communicate with each other." (Verbrugge, 1985) INTRODUCTION Most psychologists (and certainly most lay people) would agree that human beings form a significant part of their daily environment. It is something of a paradox, then, that ecological psychology, although attaching central importance to the mutuality of the organism and its environment, has not developed a social psychology. As Verbrugge (1985) suggests, within the event perception literature, organisms skilfully negotiate obstacles in their environments but they rarely appear to communicate with one another. This is all the more surprising given J.J. Gibson's early interest in social psychology, in its relevance to social issues and his fifteen years experience of teaching the topic (Gibson, 1939; 1950; 1953; 1967). Over the past seven years a number of lines of work have converged to provide some first steps toward an ecological approach to social knowing. As with so many developments in event perception and action, Cornell and Uppsala have been prominent among the settings for some of the contributions of Reuben Baron and his co-workers (Baron, 1980; 1981; McArthur & Baron, 1983; McArthur 1980) and Sverker Runeson and Gunilla Frykholm (Runeson & Frykholm, 1983; Frykholm, 1983; Runeson, 1984) respectively. Noble (1981), Knowles & Smith (1982), Shotter (1984), Ginsburg (1985) and Reed (1987 a) have also explored the relevance of aspects of ecological psychology to social knowing. There are also interesting affinities here with other non-mentalistic approaches to social knowing and social interaction e.g. Pragmatist (Farr, 1980; Shalin, 1986); Wittgensteinian (Coulter, 1983); and Hegelian approaches (Markova, 1982). One of the earliest of these contributions was a symposium on social knowing which appeared in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 1980. Commenting on the papers in this Symposium, Neisser lamented the narrow definition of the field of "social knowing", drew attention to the focus on theoretical disputes rather than on real phenomena and speculated as to what we might discover if we looked at "social knowing" in everyday life: "The first thing to find out....would be when and where it takes place. The symposiasts apparently assume that it is universal, but to me it seems to depend on a special kind of situation. The theories and experiments described here all refer to an essentially passive onlooker, who sees someone do something (or sees two people do something) and then makes a judgment about it. He....doesn't do anything - doesn't mix it up with the folks he's watching, never tests his judgments in action or interaction. He just watches and makes judgments" (Neisser, 1980 p. 604. Emphasis in original). Neisser acknowledges that there are some situations in which we come to know others in this way - e.g. watching television and similar performances, being in a room full of strangers (at a conference, perhaps?), academic life (evaluating students, appraising new faculty members etc) and, of course, being an experimental subject. Experimental subjects watch videos and slides, read or listen to vignettes but "rarely do anything besides preferring and judging....when people are genuinely engaged with each other, nobody stops to give grades" (p. 604). On the narrowness of perspective he writes: "the combined bibliographies of all the papers include not a single reference to Freud, no mention of Erving Goffman, virtually nothing on the entire field of nonverbal communication, no ethology, no ethnology or anthropology, and no hint that there are entire professions - notably in the theater and the media -whose expertise consists partly in manipulating social impressions" (p.602) Fortunately for today's symposiasts, Neisser is not present. Yet his requirements for an approach to social knowing, while severe and beyond the vision of the disciplinary myopia of most of us, are (from the point of view of ecological psychology) surely along the right lines. My principal concern in this paper is to persuade you that social knowing, in face-to-face interaction at least, depends upon not just an active perceiver but a perceiver who is inter-acting with the (social) objects of her perception. In the course of doing this I hope to demonstrate not only the mutual relevance of social and ecological psychology but also the necessity of ecological concepts for the clarification (and possible solution) of some of social psychology's traditional problems. To achieve this, it will be necessary in the course of this paper to exploit a basic human resource of social knowing - the capacity to take the perspective of another - and to shift from the point of view of the ecological psychologist to that of the social psychologist and vice versa.As there are likely to be very few social psychologists in this audience, I begin with some brief remarks about the nature of contemporary social psychology. Mindful of the strictures of Neisser noted above, I next identify some of the social phenomena to be accounted for by ecological social psychology. These phenomena will then be discussed in terms of some of the principles of ecological psychology noting where such principles may need modification or extension. In a final section I shall discuss briefly the methodological requirements of such an approach to social knowing, focussing on both recently published work in social and ecological psychology and some of my own research in progress. CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY "Social psychology and cognitive social psychology are today nearly synonymous. The cognitive approach is now clearly the dominant approach among social psychologists, having virtually no competitors ......... the social psychology of the seventies and of the eighties takes it for granted that internal representations mediate between the stimulus and its behavioural consequences and that these representations dominate the entire process." (Markus and Zajonc, 1985). Over the past twenty years or so, social psychology is said to have been on the verge of, undergoing or recovering from a crisis, or at least a crisis of confidence (Duck, 1980). This is not the time to take sides on that particular debate. To some extent it reflected a more general malaise in the intellectual world - a major "refiguration" of social thought that was itself a product of uncertainties in philosophy and philosophy of science (Bernstein, 1976; Geertz, 1980). It was also partly a product of a rediscovery of social psychology's roots in sociology as well as in psychology, a reaching beyond the limits of disciplinary specialism (Backman, 1983; House, 1977). In the fifteen years since Moscovici asked his celebrated question, "What is 'social' in social psychology?" (Moscovici, 1972), a determined effort has taken place, on both sides of the Atlantic, to develop a more social social psychology which did justice not only to social interaction but also to the products of that interaction - relationships, group structure, intergroup relations, ideology, social representations, discourse etc (Semin, 1986). It is also a social psychology which explores the meaning of extended sequences of intentional action, investigates self-monitoring, accounts, impression-management and the relationship between self and identity. Yet, as the above quotation from Markus and Zajonc conveys, it is also still a very individualistic and cognitivist social psychology locating its explanations in the cognitive processes of social actors (Pepitone, 1981). This apparent paradox can be resolved by noting that the "cognitive social psychology " referred to above by Markus and Zajonc is largely a product of a marriage of social psychology and some of the concepts and techniques of cognitive psychology (Taylor, 1981; Wyer & Srull, 1984). There is also a separate (largely European) tradition of "social cognition" research which increasingly documents the social construction or constitution of psychological processes - intelligence, emotion, cognition, the self even, an approach which maintains that "social cognition cannot be reduced to individual cognition.... it involves processes which are uniquely social in character" (Forgas, 1981 p. 269). This is an aspect of contemporary social psychology which is reminiscent of that which J.J. Gibson was so concerned about in the 1950s when he wrote about the need to counter the claims that all perception might be socially determined (Gibson, 1953). Moreover, it is a social psychology which is still struggling with two longstanding sets of problems - those surrounding "cognitivism" and those concerning the linkage between agency and social structure (Sampson, 1981; Smith, 1983). In the case of the former, current explanations of social behaviour typically appeal to the (internalised) knowledge of actors or to aspects of their cognitive resources (categorization, schemas, information- processing, typifications etc.). Knowledge of and action in the world are explained in terms of prior internalised knowledge about the social world. Researchers in the fields of both attribution and attitudes continue to experience difficulties in connecting such knowledge with behaviour (Lalljee, Brown & Ginsburg, 1984; Kelley & Michela, 1980). Current attempts to link agency and social structure tend to tilt in the direction of one or other of these two elements - one becoming dominant, the other subordinate. Either structure has been incorporated within the individual (and emasculated in the process) or agency has been overwhelmed by autonomous structural or functional factors (Giddens, 1979; Archer, 1982). Throughout its history social psychology has been plagued with the problem of its unit of analysis - whether to focus on aspects of the individual or of the group (Graumann, 1986). From time to time, various proposals have been made to link individual psychological functioning to social settings - e.g. Lewin's B = f (P,E) ; Coutu's tinsit (tendency-in-the-situation - Coutu, 1949); personality x situation research (Endler & Magnusson, 1976); perception of social episodes (Forgas, 1979). None of these approaches succeeded in dealing with the person-in-her-environment as one interdependent system; person or environment was in the end accorded greater priority. For social psychology to come to terms with the above problems remains a daunting task - it represents somewhat "grandiose plans" for social psychology. An ecological social psychology does, I submit, have a contribution to make to this task. Social psychologists under the influence of the "minds new science" (Gardner, 1985) should not be allowed to have it all their own way - there are "competitors" - some which are already informing research on social knowing. There is an alternative, though a sizeable "loan of faith" may be required to see one through the early stages. SOME PHENOMENA OF SOCIAL KNOWING During his time at Smith College, J.J. Gibson acquired from Koffka and Heider a healthy appreciation of the value of a phenomenological perspective. A study of the perception of another person's looking behaviour (Gibson & Pick, 1963) begins with an analysis of the terms used in ordinary speech to distinguish modes of looking - revealing ten variants of the verb to look (staring, peering, glancing, glowering etc), eleven adverbial modifiers of the verb (looking directly, askance, boldly, sternly, even unseeingly) and many idiomatic expressions or metaphors (catching my eye, stealing a glance, cast an eye on etc). The existence and use of such terms does not, of course, confirm that such discriminations can be made. These terms point to possible discriminations on the part of social knowers. With reference to knowing others, J.J. Gibson wrote: "An understanding of life with one's fellow creatures depends on an adequate description of what these creatures offer and then on an analysis of how these offerings are perceived" (Gibson, 1979, p. 42). Before considering the question of what others offer us, what at a phenomenal level, do we know about others? The following is just a partial listing. Social knowers are aware: of the properties of others that they share such knowledge with others that they acquire knowledge in the presence of others who do likewise that they explore their environments in pursuit of their goals that they coordinate their actions with those of others that they manage impressions, save face, get embarrassed and angry that they account for, justify and excuse their behaviour that they are also observers of themselves and others that they are speakers and listeners as well as lookers and seeers J.J. Gibson was clearly aware of the special importance of the perception of other people and of the shared world in which we live: "People are animated objects, to be sure, with complex affordances for behaviour; but they are more than that. People are not only parts of the environment but also perceivers of the environment. Hence a given observer perceives other perceivers. And he also perceives what others perceive. In this way each observer is aware of a shared environment, one that is common to all observers, not just his environment" (Gibson, 1974. Emphasis in original). In his paper to this Symposium Robert Shaw devotes his attention to the essential task of clarifying the nature of the social invariants which make possible our awareness of such a shared environment. The phenomena of social knowing outlined above represent quite an ambitious agenda for any social psychology. J.J. Gibson perhaps had this complexity in mind when, writing in his autobiography about the period of his own involvement in social psychology, he remarked: "Social psychology looked a good deal easier then than it does now....social behavior was less predictable than we thought" (Gibson, 1967; reprinted in Reed & Jones, 1982, pp. 8-9). TOWARDS AN ECOLOGICAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF SOCIAL KNOWING "The awareness of a common world, the sharing of our perceptions, is not entirely due to our verbal agreements with one another ...... It is also due to the independence of our perceptions from a fixed point of observation, the ability to pick up invariants over time. This underlies the ability to get knowledge by means of pictures and words. The social psychology of knowledge has a basis in ecological optics" (Gibson, 1974. Emphasis in original). If, as J.J.Gibson suggests in the above quotation, the social psychology of knowledge has a basis in ecological optics, what are the implications of this for our understanding of the links between social knowing, action and inter-action and what might social psychology contribute to such an understanding? Perception, action and inter-action The topic of person perception has been a central one for much of social psychology's development. There have been articles on the topic in all three editions of the Handbook of Social Psychology. The role of perceptual factors in social knowing has, until recently however, been all but eclipsed by the growth of more cognitive perspectives, especially attribution theory. It is now almost twenty years since Tagiuri, concluding his article on person perception in the second edition of the Handbook, wrote: "One direction of worthwhile effort would be to develop further the appropriate methods for studying the relation of perception and action. What is perceived about another person is certainly a determinant of the interaction, but not the sole one. How does the perception of the other relate to action towards him?.... There is a need for studies of the judgments made about persons in the course of ordinary transactions with their environment....where people are truly interacting, and where observer and observed are simultaneously judge and object" (Tagiuri, 1969). I am aware of only a handful of studies in the psychological literature which go any way towards meeting this challenge. Indeed, Swann (1984) has recently returned to this theme with a plea for the recognition that it "may simply be the case that it is impossible to fully understand the nature of social thought without simultaneously considering the nature of social interaction" (Swann, 1984 p. 473). In this section I wish to identify and explore in a preliminary way some of the links between perception, action and interaction. I shall confine myself to two-person situations and to some examples drawn mainly from studies of the early stages of interaction - greetings or openings. The reciprocity of perception and action is as important in the case of social knowing as anywhere. Our social actions are guided by our knowledge of others and that knowledge is enhanced and refined through exploratory action. Moreover, our inter-action with others is both dependent upon and contributes to our knowledge of those others. Perceivers may also influence what they come to know in so far as they select both interaction contexts and interaction partners (Bowers, 1973; Swann, 1984). They may also attempt to assess how much power they have over the behaviour of others (Gilbert, Jones & Pelham, 1987). In what follows I wish to focus, however, on some more general links between social knowing and social interaction. Warren & Shaw (1985) have recently proposed that the unit of analysis for an ecological psychology be the encounter. This they define as: "an ecological event in which an animal participates either as an actor or as a perceiver preparatory to action. We define an action as an intentional behavior" (Warren & Shaw, 1985, p.10). Subject to revision, I propose that the unit of analysis for an ecological social psychology be the social encounter. Following Warren and Shaw, this might be defined as: "an ecological event in which two or more persons participate either as actors or as perceivers preparatory to action. Action is defined as an intentional behaviour." Thus social encounters are "pregnant with information" relevant to the control of action and inter- action, wedding "the acting-and-perceiving organism to the environment and to others in the service of the organism's needs and intentions" (p.10). The Organisation of Face-to-Face Interaction At this point I should like to follow Neisser's advice and introduce some social psychology - mainly some work of Goffman, Mead and Kendon. Goffman sees our face-to-face communication with others as "embodied". As he puts it: "a frown, a spoken word, or a kick is a message that a sender conveys by means of his own current bodily activity" (Goffman, 1963, p.14). Goffman goes on to identify what he regards as two crucial communication conditions of social interaction: 1) "that any message that an individual sends is likely to be qualified and modified by much additional information that others glean from him simultaneously, often unbeknownst to him ...." (p.15). This gives rise to the possibility of using the latter (often non-verbal) information as a check on the former (often verbal) information. Now, ordinarily (except when peeping through keyholes or, hidden by curtains we look out of windows) in receiving embodied messages from others we also make ourselves available as a source of embodied messages for them. A second crucial communication condition thus emerges: 2) "not only are the receiving and conveying of the naked and embodied kind, but each giver is himself a receiver, and each receiver is a giver" (pp.15-16). In other words, often we are both simultaneously (my emphasis) receiving and transmitting messages to others, a point which J.J. Gibson himself recognised when he wrote: "What the other animal affords the observer is not only behavior but also social interaction. As one moves so does the other, the one sequence of action being suited to the other in a kind of behavioral loop. All social interaction is of this sort - sexual, maternal, competitive, cooperative - or it may be social grooming, play and even human conversation" (Gibson, 1979, p.42). But these "behavioral loops" involve shared and, I would suggest, socially generated meanings. For Goffman (and ecological social psychologists) there is an important implication of this second communication condition concerning the role of seeing in human social communication: "Each individual can see that he is being experienced in some way, and he will guide at least some of his conduct according to the perceived identity and initial response of his audience. Further he can be seen to be seeing this, and can see that he has been seen seeing this" (p.16). This "special mutuality of immediate social interaction" was of particular interest to George Herbert Mead whose approach to social knowing is similar in many respects to that of J.J. Gibson, especially with regard to meaning, the links between perception and action and organism-environment mutuality (Mead, 1938). Central to Mead's account of social knowing is our ability to "take the perspective of the other". In Mead's later work, as a result of the impact of the writings of Whitehead (Mead, 1927), this terminology replaced the more familiar "taking the role of the other" (Mead, 1934). It is this ability which enables us to take ourselves as objects of our own scrutiny, self-knowledge arising through the reflected appraisals of others. Mead makes much of our ability to switch these perspectives. Moreover, this can occur in the auditory as well as visual modality. We can hear ourselves speak more readily than we can (without recourse to mechanical intervention) observe our own actions. Farr and Anderson (1983) have recently explored some of the implications of these remarks for our understanding of the notion of the "divergent perspectives" of "actors" and "observers" (Jones & Nisbett, 1971). Just as Farr & Anderson propose Mead as a necessary addition to Heider and Jones & Nisbett, I wish to suggest that Gibson needs to be added to this account to provide an empirical base for the mutualist program in terms of the availability of ecological information. But before action can get underway other matters have to be attended to. Goffman (1959) has pointed out that in any focussed encounter a particular "definition of the situation" comes to be shared by the participants, a "frame" comes to be placed round the actions and the utterances of the participants, which both determines the sense in which they are to be taken and serves to define whole ranges of possible acts as irrelevant. Adam Kendon (whose research skilfully blends the methods of human ethology with social psychological concepts) provides numerous detailed examples of how features of observable behaviour in face-to-face interactional contexts can function as a way of providing the advance information that anyone proposing to interact with another has to have, with how shared "frames" or "definitions of the situation" come to be established. I believe that these examples can be better understood in ecological rather than cognitivist terms. The main business of the encounter has first to be established. Kendon points out how vocalisation and speech are specially oriented to and "take a kind of first place in the attentional hierarchy" (Kendon, 1985, p.234). He also suggests, on the basis of one of his earlier studies (Kendon, 1978), that it is probable that certain patterns of organisation of bodily movement are given central status "simply by virtue of their character" (p. 234). In this study, subjects watched a silent film of a man making a speech to a large gathering. They were afterwards asked what they had observed of the man's actions. All observers first reported only those movements that, they maintained, had to do with what the speaker was trying to say. Interestingly, from an ecological point of view, there was a very high degree of agreement between subjects as to which aspects of his movements were referred to in this way. Kendon, drawing upon the work of Michotte (1950) and Johansson (1973), proposes the hypothesis that his subjects "recognize, from the kinetic organization of movement alone, what is deliberate and of significance and what is not." (Kendon, 1978, p.309. My emphasis). A more ecological explanation of Kendon's findings can be provided if one invokes Runeson's KSD principle (" kinematics specifies dynamics", Runeson & Frykholm, 1983) or the notion of "amodal" invariants (Neisser, 1985 b). Thus the subjects were detecting invariants which specified what the man was doing, these invariants being detectable from movement in this case but being capable of detection from speech and movement or speech alone (hence amodal). In terms of the KSD principle the kinematics specified the (speech-initiated) dynamics. Kendon puts forward a hypothesis to explain his results which has a very ecological flavour: "as percipients we differentiate the behaviour of others into a number of different action systems and attend to them differentially, accordingly; as actors we organize and produce behavior also in terms of an number of different systems, systems of action and systems of perceptual analysis which are mutually tuned to one another" (Kendon, 1978. Emphasis in original). Kendon (1985) also shows how we may employ "spatial orientational manoeuvres" as a means of testing out each other's alignments to a given interpretive frame or as a means of finding out if the other is willing to change to a new one, e.g. in a standing conversational group - the significance of standing back as encounters are brought to an end. Consider the following example: "... we were able to see how, prior to any exchange of salutation, p would place himself and orient hmself in relation to q, but then not make any move toward q or begin any address until after q had begun to turn his head toward p. Often p would allow his gaze to meet q's gaze, and this seemed to provide the clearance p needed to embark upon an approach and a salutation. However one sometimes observed a carefully orchestrated eye-avoidance in which p, who has taken the initiative by orienting to q, leaves it to q to begin the salutational exchange, but not until he has let q know he is attentive to him by looking away from him synchronously with q's looking at him" (Kendon, 1985). In this example (drawn from a corpus of filmed greetings in which the protocols included a record of the activities of both parties before any exchange of greetings could be observed) the knowledge that p and q have of one another is both influenced by and influences their actions towards one another. Moreover, the role of inter-action - of joint activity in the management of "seeing and being seen" - is vividly conveyed by Kendon. In an earlier study of a "kissing round", Kendon examined how changes in interactional routines are negotiated in the context of an ongoing social encounter (Kendon, 1975). The change in question was from girl kissing man to man kissing girl. Kendon shows how, before the new routine was established, a phase in the kissing round occurred in which an actual kiss did not occur but each person made moves that were partial enactments of the moves that would be made in the new phase of the round. Kendon describes here a form of social knowing in which the participants, on the basis of their previous inter-action, convey to one another a readiness for a new kind of interactive relationship before they proceed to it. 2. Social Affordances It is with the notion of affordances of the environment - "what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill" Gibson, 1979 p. 127) - that we come to one of the potentially most important contributions of ecological psychology to social knowing. For J.J.Gibson we perceive the use-value or meaning of objects and events. This notion cuts across a number of troublesome dichotomies: "An important fact about the affordances of the environment is that they are in a sense objective, real, and physical, unlike values and meanings, which are often supposed to be subjective, phenomenal, and mental. But, actually, an affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer" (p. 129). I share the view, however, recently expressed by Costall (1981) that J.J. Gibson didn't fully reconcile his theory of affordances with his central insight about the role of activity in perception: "Visual information is not exclusive and sufficient in the control of all our actions in the world; the visual system is not autonomous (Gibson, 1966). Furthermore, the perceptual systems are a part-system of a larger system; perception is often concurrent with our activities, rather than a preliminary phase. The point is, surely, that we perceive that a surface affords walking in the very activity .... the essential point of the theory of affordances is that our primary way of coming to know objects is in our practical dealings with them" (Costall, 1981). The attempts by Dewey and Mead to avoid a "spectator theory of knowledge" were also built upon the role of activity in knowing. So too must a theory of social knowing acknowledge that, in face-to-face interaction with another, we perceive what the other person affords us (helping, competing, offending or whatever) in the course of that activity, during (and not just at the beginning of) the interaction itself. Now given that often in social life, what the actions of another person mean or indicate may initially be unclear, we depend upon subsequent interaction to clarify what the other is doing. Shotter provides the following example: "They were walking very close now. Her hand brushed more than accidentally it seemed against his. He grasped it. She turned towards him, startled, eyebrows raised, a questioning look. He smiled and squeezed her hand more tightly in his. She turned away, head slightly bowed. He loosened his grip and silently her hand slipped away" (Shotter, 1981, p.165). Shotter uses this passage to provide a "gloss" on what the couple afford one another - in this case what is initially a "vague, global and unformulated mode of relationship, is progressively shaped, specified, or formulated at a practical level by them in their actual conduct of it" (p.166). Here, by means of his "smile", the man conveys to the woman his interest in developing further their relationship, fully respecting her personhood, responding perhaps to her "invitation". She in turn conveys by her look and the inactivity of her hand that her "invitation" was in fact accidental or, perhaps, withdrawn. Now at this point in the relationship, the man may reasonably conclude that while a range of potential projects may be realised with this woman - after all she hasn't actually gone away - it might not be prudent to investigate further the prospect of a physical relationship between them. Shotter notes: "his status in relation to her in at least this sphere of activity, is now at least to a degree, somewhat more clear; and it will be a while before he takes her hand again" (p.166). Their perceptions of one another unfold as their joint activity unfolds. Just as non-social affordances depend on the relationship between the organism and its environment, so too do social affordances depend on the relationship between organisms and between them and their (joint) environments. This need not make the organism-organism and organism- environment any less real (Costall, 1986). What is afforded is not dependent on either person alone. The information available from each person is in a continuous process of transformation as the joint activity progresses. In Shotter's terms, the man and woman experience the "state of affairs" (the meaning ) specified at any particular point in the exchange as a "means" to express themselves, by specifying it further. Now while I agree with J.J. Gibson that "other persons can only give off information about themselves insofar as they are tangible, audible, odorous, tastable, or visible" (Gibson 1979, p. 135), I also believe it to be the case that such information frequently requires human activity to reveal it. As my colleague Arthur Still and I recently remarked: "There is no detailed account within (Gibson's) theory, of activities which are not merely exploratory of available information, but which themselves provoke the transformations of informational structure which specify affordances. Such transformations must specify animate rather than inanimate movement, and allow for some form of continuous, causal correlation with the provoking activities" (Good & Still, 1987). Now while what one person affords the other may be independent of the needs of the other (Reed, 1987 b), can it be independent of the previous activity of the other? I believe not. Is the reluctance on the part of ecological psychologists to acknowledge that environments may change as a result of the activity of perceivers an example of their commitment to an ecological realism outweighing their commitment to a pragmatist realism? Moreover, the uncertainty in this situation is not a result of any paucity of information. If anything there is too much information available, an abundance of potential affordances. Is it a matter, then, of multiple invariants being involved in the perception of social events (Cutting, 1986)? But how can the richly variable characteristics of human beings be related to the notion of affordances? Shaw, Turvey & Mace (1982) have proposed the notion of effectivities - the action capabilities of the perceiving agent - as a complementary organism-referent term to be related to the affordances of the environment. (Figure 1). While this notion may help us understand cross-species variations in behaviour. Can it deal with variations in life experiences within species? In the case of human beings the effectivities of one person must surely provide sources of affordances for the other and vice versa. How do such effectivities arise? In what ways do they constrain what we afford one another? Cutting(1982) has recently suggested that in order to answer questions such as these we need a full-blown theory of personality and choice. Lappin's recent discussion of the relationship between individual knowledge and the social environment from the perspective of research in perception and psychophysics provides one useful starting point for such a theory (Lappin, 1981). In this Lappin suggests that "prior knowledge" may usefully be understood as "an anticipation of the consequences of action". Perhaps Neisser was right after all and we do need to bring in Freud and develop an ecological account of motivation as well. So far I have said nothing about the wider cultural context of these face-to-face encounters. The interactants, typically, are competent and knowledgeable members of various social and cultural groups. They are in a cultural environment and the information which they pick up is embedded within that cultural environment. Semin & Manstead (1983) have recently provided a timely reminder of the need to take into account a number of roles played by culture: "in providing a language which incorporates explanatory concepts in its descriptive terms; in providing rules and conventions against which the appropriateness of observed behaviours can be assessed; and in providing social actors with a stock of knowledge which contains interpretive schemata shared by members of a common culture, and which enables the more or less flawless interaction of everyday life" (Semin & Manstead, 1983 p. 41). While there is quite a complex story to be told about how we become "attuned" to cultural knowledge, I don't believe that our understanding of such "observed behaviours" will be advanced by locating such cultural knowledge "inside the heads" of its members. Discussing the limitations of a conception of culture as "shared knowledge of individual minds", Geertz makes the following points: "If.....we take, say, a Beethoven quartet as an, admittedly rather special but for these purposes, nicely illustrative, sample of culture, no one would, I think, identify it with a score, with the skills and knowledge needed to play it, with the understanding of it possessed by its performers or auditors, nor..... with a particular performance of it or with some mysterious entity transcending material existence..... But that a Beethoven quartet is a temporally developed tonal structure, a coherent sequence of modelled sound - in a word, music - and not anybody's knowledge of or belief about anything, including how to play it, is a proposition to which most people are, upon reflection, likely to assent" (Geertz, 1973, pp.11-12). To successfully bring off a performance of such a quartet certainly involves the skilled use of ecological information in reading one's part, playing in tune (or diplomatically out of tune) with others. But it also depends on the subtle co-ordination of one's playing with others in the matters of rhythm, dynamics, and articulation as well as more stylistic matters as phrasing and ornamentation. It involves a complex form of social knowing in which each player takes the "meaning" which is specified at any particular point in a performance as a "means" for further specifying what is afforded by both the part before him and the "musical product" of the joint activity of all the players. As I see it, this brief digression on the social psychology of quartet playing illustrates the creativity of social knowing; each performance of a quartet enables the players to create afresh what they afford one another, not simply discover affordances in the structured light and sound energies. It is the players attunement to ecological information however, as members of a musical sub-culture which enables such performances to be realised. This digression also reveals the necessity of a detailed account of our socialised awareness, an ecological account of socialisation. Reed (1987 a) has made an important contribution to this task in his notion of representational systems. With this notion Reed links ecological information (e.g. for places and events), mediated perception (e.g. picture-making) and culturally specific institutions that evolved from the direct and indirect modes of awareness (e.g. drawing systems). WHAT METHODS SHOULD BE EMPLOYED? "The history of ecological analysis in perception and in the study of concepts suggests that a simple commitment to take the environment seriously often has radical consequences" (Neisser, 1985 a, p.30) "Taking the environment seriously" in the case of studies of social knowing inevitably involves some element of commitment to studies of social knowing in everyday settings. But it need not involve an exclusive commitment to a naturalistic approach. As Neisser himself notes: "The most typical characteristic of the ecological approach is not an aversion to the laboratory but an attempt to maintain the integrity of the variables that matter in natural settings" (p.25). The "embodied" nature of human communication was referred to above. The significance of various aspects of such communication has been much explored in the nonverbal communication literature. There has, however, been relatively little attention to the question of just how informative kinematics (body movements in general) are to the perceiver of human social actions. The early contributions by Heider on the perceptual aspects of social knowing (Heider, 1939; Heider & Simmel, 1944) and by the Gestalt social psychologists Asch and From have not been built upon (Asch, 1952; From, 1960). The notion that we "directly perceive certain qualities of action in the relation of persons to objects and to other persons" is central to the account of social interaction given by the Gestalt social psychologist Solomon Asch (Asch, 1952). The following passages capture the contemporary relevance of his analysis of the informativeness of kinematic configurations: "If we follow the qualities of acts such as approaching and withdrawing, it is because we respond to their form; we would not perceive them if we saw merely a sequence of separate, specific movements. It is therefore appropriate to propose that these actions have Ehrenfels-qualities and that this fact makes possible our....perception of them (p. 151). "....in addition we see persons engaging in actions that have a psychological content. We see one person fleeing and another pursuing; one person giving to another who takes"(p.151). Referring to the Heider & Simmel (1944) study of apparent behaviour, Asch makes the following highly relevant remark about human movement: ".....it would seem to follow that we initially perceive movement forms in persons in a dynamic-causal way.....movements which form kinetic structures possess the properties of happenings or actions" (p. 156). In a further passage which is worth quoting in full Asch writes: "Our problem of relating actions to inward experiences would be solved if we could abandon the assumption that phenomenal facts and the actions that correspond to them are utterly heterogeneous, if we could reverse this assumption and say that the organized properties of experience are structurally similar to those of the corresponding actions. We could then conclude that the emotion of joy and the expressions of joy have identical characteristics, that formally the same qualities are present in the experience and movements of tension, hesitation and daring. With this step we would provide the basis for the grasp of the psychological situation of others through the observation of their actions. At the same time we would be reversing completely the subjectivistic conception of consciousness: from being hidden and private, consciousness would become something accessible to us through action" (p. 158. My emphasis). Here Asch seems to capture the essence of a non-mentalistic conception of social knowing, revealed "directly" in their actions. Asch's position may be seen in a tradition of direct perception that includes not only J.J. Gibson but also the early Heider and possibly Tolman as well (Good & Still, 1986). Asch's explanation of the link between the psychological properties of persons and these kinetic structures is a characteristically Gestalt one based on an isomorphism between brain states and human actions. Alternative ecological explanations would emphasise higher-order invariants or biomechanical aspects of the movements specifying underlying dynamic person properties (Runeson & Frykholm, 1983). I only have time to briefly identify a few lines of approach to the study of social knowing which are in sympathy with the above remarks. 1) Point-light displays. In the wake of Johansson's (1973) pioneering studies of the perception of biological motion, Cutting (Cutting & Kozlowski, 1977), and Runeson (Runeson & Frykholm, 1983) among others have clearly demonstrated that information from human movements can specify properties of persons as diverse as gait, gender, identity, effort, intention and expectation. Although some of these point-light displays had involved more than one person, none of the studies had utilised social actions (i.e. focused joint activity) in the displays. In a paper presented to the Uppsala Conference I reported the results of an exploratory study which extended the Johansson point-light display technique to the study of such social actions (Good, 1985). Observers viewed a series of point-light displays derived from two-person sequences of social action (an accidental collision and help, asking for a light, a collision and argument, an unwelcome sexual advance, a chance greeting between old friends). These sequences were selected in order to explore a variety of both intentional and accidental events and a range of person properties. Observers either provided free descriptions of what they perceived or attempted to identify each sequence from a list of descriptions including a number of filler items. The results clearly showed that the observers invariably perceived human social actions with a striking degree of immediacy and a surprising degree of accuracy. Moreover, the point-light displays provided informational support for some quite subtle properties of persons and their interactions. The degree of complexity of the sequences of social action was an important factor influencing subject's perceptions. The use of role-playing by the actors in the preparation of the sequences, however, may have led to some confusion about their true as opposed to deceptive intentions (Runeson & Frykholm, 1973). In future studies, the use of displays generated by computer simulation may overcome such problems (Bertenthal & Kramer, 1984). Use could also be made of experimental manipulations similar to those of Runeson & Frykholm (1983). In these, the point-light displays are stopped at significant points in the action to determine what was being conveyed to observers up to that point in the tape. It would also be interesting to see whether the use of segmentation procedures with such displays could provide results comparable with those found with normal video techniques (Newtson, 1976; 1980). More recently I have carried out a pilot study of the perception of social control using point-light displays. In this, observers view a series of point-light displays of two persons engaged in a construction task (assembling a structure from a number of rectangular wooden blocks). The task is carried out in a number of conditions in which the nature of the social control of the task is varied (i.e. one of the two persons is assigned as leader; control arises spontaneously in the course of the task; a third person controls the task externally). Preliminary results suggest that the observers can determine from the displays which social control condition they are viewing, suggesting once again that the kinematics of the displays are informative about intentional social actions. The design of these existing point-light display studies is, I suggest, insufficiently ecological. This might be argued on grounds that the displays are impoverished. Michaels and Carello (1981) have rightly made the point that the ecological notion of rich stimulation normally available to perceivers does not rule out the possibility of experimental manipulation designed to see just how little information is needed for effective perception. Existing point-light display studies are insufficiently ecological, however, because they retain a pervasive feature of traditional cognitive studies of social perception - that noted by Neisser above - an essentially passive observer. 2) Interactive Point-light displays. At Durham I have recently been developing a procedure to enable actor-perceivers to perceive and interact with the kinematic information in the point-light display directly. These interactive point-light displays involve two actor-perceivers wearing reflective patches, each facing a camera and each viewing synchronously the kinematic information from the other on a monitor (Figure 2). With such a design it has proved possible to examine the degree of social coordination of action which can be achieved with kinematic information alone. The main problem concerns the difficulty of finding "realistic" tasks under these unusual conditions (the most successful task to date involving a game of charades). These interactive displays could also be used in studies of self-perception as the actor-perceiver is presented with the kinematic "perspective" which others normally have of him. 3) A More Functional Approach to the Study of Social Knowing. In light of the discussion of the links between action, inter-action and perception outlined above, there is a need for studies of the way in which social knowing occurs in the course of interaction. Given the importance of exploratory activity in the perception of the non-social environment, an examination of the role of exploration in the enhancement, testing and refinement of social knowing is likely to prove fruitful. Although some of this exploration is likely to be visual much of it, as suggested above, is likely to involve the use of language. Such a functional approach to social knowing would take note of the fact that social perception and action typically take place simultaneously and not sequentially. The "special mutuality of social interaction" noted above also needs to be taken account of here as well as the "interpersonal context" in social perception. A more functional approach to visual communication has already been called for by Rutter (1984) in his valuable review of the social psychology of looking and seeing. Patterson (1982) has also developed a functional approach to nonverbal communication showing how various nonverbal channels combine to achieve interpersonal and other goals. A useful topic on which to begin would be that of the openings and closings of encounters. Despite Kendon's fine studies referred to above we know remarkably little about how interactions get off the ground. In addition to Kendon's work some useful pointers can be found in the research of Couch (1984) and Heath (1987). Such ecological studies of social knowing could extend, and I believe, enhance the work of developmental ecological psychologists and thus foster the "renascence of functionalism" recently identified by Eleanor Gibson (Gibson, 1982). CONCLUSION In this paper I have outlined some phenomena of social knowing in everyday life. I have drawn attention to the neglect of the perceptual aspects of social knowing in contemporary social psychology. Some aspects of the inter-relationships between perception, action and inter-action were discussed in relation to ecological principles. The central but problematic status of social affordances in an ecological social psychology was noted. Some implications for the methods of an ecological social psychology of social knowing were identified. Alan Costall ended his paper to the Uppsala conference two years ago by drawing attention to the need for an ecological social psychology to reconcile the demands of both a "moral" and an "experimental science" (Costall, 1985). Gibson also shared that concern for social action grounded in valid knowledge yet his theory of social knowing remained somewhat individuocentric. Mead and Dewey saw social change as arising through the joint actions of a community of knowers who encountered and revealed their values in their engagement with the world. An ecological social psychology that is sensitive to the concerns of both J.J. Gibson and his Pragmatist forefathers is long overdue. It is appropriate to end this paper with some remarks by J.J. Gibson himself. In his 1950 paper ("The implications of learning theory for social psychology") Gibson (ever the "practical theorist") concluded as follows: "The requirements and responsibilities of such a theory may seem overwhelming to the habitual experimenter, and the theory demanded may appear too grandiose. Scientists, he will object, should proceed step by step, and with caution. But this, I assert, is a misplaced emphasis. The stepwise and careful procedure applies to the scientists' methods, not to the scope and range of his theories or to the plans which he may lay out for them. Social psychology has no choice but to make grandiose plans. They may or may not come to fulfilment, but it is worth trying." (Gibson, 1950, p.167). I submit, in conclusion, that our "grandiose plans" must rest upon ecological foundations. REFERENCES Archer, M.S. (1982). 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